Re: [TUHS] banner (was troff was not so widely usable)

[Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com>]

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On 2/13/21 3:00 AM, Brian Walden wrote:
> Thank you for banner! I used the data, abliet modified, 40 years ago
> in 1981, for a banner program as well, on an IBM 1130 (manufactured 1972)
> so it could print on an 1132 line printer. The floor would vibrate
> when it printed those banners. I used "X" as the printed char as the
> 1132 did not have the # char. But those banners looked great!
> I wrote it in FORTRAN IV. On punched cards. I did this because
> from 1980-1982 I only had access to UNIX on Monday evenings from
> 7PM-9PM, using a DEC LA120 terminal, it was slow and never had
> enough ink on the ribbon.
>
> I had only 8K of core memory with only EBCIDIC uppercase so there
> were lots of compromises and cleverness needed -
> - read in a 16-bit integer as a packed two 8-bit numbers
> - limit the banner output to only A-Za-z0-9 !?#@'*+,-.=
> - unpack the char data into buffer and then process it.
> - fix the "U" charater data
> - find the run-lenght ecnodings that could be consoldated to save space
>    (seeing those made me think it had to have been generated data)
>
> The program still survives here - http://ibm1130.cuzuco.com/
> (with sample output runs)
>
> Also since I had to type all those numbers onto punch cards
> with a 029 keypunch, to speed things up I coded my own free-form
> atoi() equivalent in FORTRAN, reading cards, then packed two numbers into
> a integer, then punch out those numbers along with card ID numbers in columns
> 73-80 on the 1442.  This was many weeks of keypunching, checking,
> fixing and re-keypunching.
> That code is here http://ibm1130.cuzuco.com/ipack.html
>
> When done the deck was around 8" or so. It took well over a
> minute to read in the data cards, after complition.
>
> Again thanks! Many hundreds of banners for many people were printed
> by this, around 2 to 3 a week, until July 1982, when that IBM
> was replaced by a Prime system. I still have many found memeories of
> that 1130.
>
> -Brian
>
> Mary Ann Horton (mah at mhorton.net) wrote:
>> We had vtroff at Berkeley around 1980, on the big Versatec wet plotter,
>> 4 pages wide. We got really good at cutting up the pages on the output.
>>
>> It used the Hershey font. It was horrible. Mangled somehow, lots of
>> parts of glyphs missing. I called it the "Horse Shit" font.
>>
>> I took it as my mission to clean it up. I wrote "fed" to edit it, dot by
>> dot, on the graphical HP 2648 terminal at Berkeley. I got all the fonts
>> reasonably cleaned up, but it was laborious.
>>
>> I still hated Hershey. It was my dream to get real C/A/T output at the
>> largest 36 point size, and scan it in to create a decent set of Times
>> fonts. I finally got the C/A/T output years later at Bell Labs, but
>> there were no scanners available to me at the time. Then True Type came
>> along and it was moot.
>>
>> I did stumble onto one nice rendition of Times Roman in one point size,
>> from Stanford, I think. I used it to write banner(6).
Nice. I wrote a banner program in 1984, as a freshman in college for the 
TRS-80 Model 100 laptop (with an 8x40 LCD), in BASIC, which if I recall 
was the OS of the thing? It would peek the character ROM and use the 
encodings (characters were stored in ROM as a 2d binary array bitmap) to 
determine what to print to the printer and did some form of vertical and 
horizontal expansion to reasonably fill up the sheets. I don't remember 
if I took the horizontal and vertical expansion as input from the user 
or what (it's been a while, and the code is long gone), or if I just 
figured out what looked good on the ol' dot matrix we had access to and 
set them... but it was, at the time, my crowning achievement in 
programming. Everyone else in the class took pages and pages of code to 
print their banners without reference to the character ROM, whereas mine 
did it in very few lines of easy to understand, if somewhat complex (not 
complicated, mind you), code (the story of my much later career).

Wow, that brings back memories :).. snip! after writing what turned into 
my life story, I decided to spare y'all. Suffice it to say my early 
experiences with computation (Commodore PET, TRS-80 Model 100, DEC 
Rainbow 100) and later more formal educational experiences (my first 
real maths and upper division cs professors) changed my life's 
trajectory and gave me the tools to help me rise out of decades of 
extremely harsh circumstances. Thank you Dennis, especially for C. I 
wish I could have known you and thanked you personally. C was my vehicle 
out of the depths of poverty and hardship. Sigh, sniff, and smile. Now, 
I explore Unix, both historic and modern for fun, pester y'all with 
questions, opinions, and sundry, teach CS and IS for fun and pay, and 
hope that I can share 1/10th of the joy I experience every day with my 
students and inspire them to pursue careers in the field.

Banner on!

Will

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